Acceptance & Contentment

There’s so much said about how Buddhism teaches acceptance that it comes as a surprise when you look at the Pāli Canon and see that, aside from accepting invitations, there are only four things the Buddha has you accept. And there are two main things he says not to accept which, even though they’re just two, cover a much larger territory.

He has you accept the fact that:

In each of those cases, the Buddha doesn’t simply have you put up with the suffering that comes from accepting these things. He actually gives you tools so that you don’t have to suffer from them.

• As we mentioned in the talk on pain, the Buddha recommends that you develop feelings of pleasure through concentration, that you become sensitive to how feelings have an effect on the mind through the way you perceive feelings of pain, and that you can calm that effect by changing the perceptions. We’ve already discussed this in detail, so I’ll just mention it now.

• That brings us to the next topic, which is painful and hurtful words. The Buddha has you reflect that there are many kinds of speech in the human world: true and false, useful and useless, words said with a mind of goodwill and those said with inner hate. This is the nature of human speech. So when you’re a victim of false, ill-intentioned, and useless speech, you have to remind yourself that this is normal. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. If you want to hear speech that’s only true and useful and said with good intentions, you’re in the wrong world.

In other words, he has you depersonalize the speech. You may feel that you’re the victim of this kind of speech, but then you have to realize it’s everywhere. That helps to lessen the sense of being singled out for something extraordinarily bad.

And you should still have goodwill for the people saying those things, no matter what they say. To help you do this, he recommends that you keep certain perceptions in mind, perceptions meant to remind you that your goodwill can be much bigger than whatever harm those people can do.

One perception is that your goodwill is like the earth. A man comes along with a shovel and a hoe, and he wants the earth to be without earth. So he digs here, digs there; spits here, spits there; pees here, pees there, saying, “Be without earth, be without earth.” But the earth will never be without earth because of those puny efforts. In other words, have a sense that your goodwill is really large, much larger than anything other people can do to you.

Another image is of the river Ganges, which is wide and large. Someone comes along with a torch and tries to burn up the river. As long as the river’s not polluted, it’s not going to be set on fire. So have a sense that your goodwill is vast and wet. Nothing can set it on fire.

Another good image is that your goodwill is like space. People can try to write words on space, but the words don’t stick, because there’s no surface for them to stick to. Try to see that the words other people say don’t stick in your mind.

So try to develop these perceptions about your goodwill: that your goodwill is this large, this non-flammable, offering no surface to which anything can stick. That makes it a lot easier to put up with the efforts of other people to hurt you with their speech.

Remind yourself also of the Buddha’s image of the bandits trying to cut you into pieces with a saw—that even in a case like that, he would have you cultivate goodwill for them. As he says, “If you keep this image in mind, are there any words that you couldn’t endure?”

There’s another image that Ven. Sāriputta gives to help de-personalize unskillful speech: When someone says something nasty to you, just tell yourself, “Okay, an unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear. When the contact stops, the sound stops.” And you leave it there. Now, our problem is we don’t leave it there. We pull it in and then we stab ourselves with it. So the question is, “Whose fault is that?” The sound stopped a while back, but you’re the one who’s still stabbing yourself with it. The trick is just to let those sounds stop at the ear and die away. Then tell yourself, “I’ve learned something about that person.” It may not be what you wanted to learn, but the important thing is that you don’t hurt yourself with those words.

So those are some of the techniques the Buddha has you use to deal with unpleasant words. Even though you have to accept the fact that you’re exposed to such words, as he says, you don’t have to suffer from them. Now, acceptance here doesn’t mean that you don’t respond, simply that you don’t respond out of the sense of anger that comes from hurting yourself with those words. The less you hurt yourself with other people’s unskillful speech, the more likely you’ll be to think of a skillful response.

• As for mistakes you made in the past, the Buddha says that you admit the mistakes and make a determination not to repeat those mistakes. That’s the best a human being can do. Then you spread thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself so that you don’t keep on beating yourself up with those memories; goodwill for the person you harmed; and goodwill for all beings. Remind yourself that you don’t want to harm anybody.

• The final thing the Buddha has you accept is the fact that someone has died. There’s a story in the commentary of a queen who has died but the king refuses to accept that she’s dead. So he keeps the body in the palace. Of course, this upsets the people in the palace, so they want to try to find some way of getting him to accept the fact that she’s dead. They go see a monk who’s psychic and ask him, “Can you find where she’s gone?” It turns out she’d been reborn as a worm. So they find the worm, and the monk takes the worm into the palace. He uses his psychic powers to have a conversation with the worm in front of the king. He asks the worm, “Do you miss your husband, the king?” The worm says, “Oh, no, not at all! I have a really nice husband worm now who treats me much better.” The king hears this: “Get rid of the body.” That’s a story in the commentary, it’s not in the Canon, so I can’t guarantee it’s true.

But the Canon does report that the Buddha advises you to admit your grief over the person who’s died and to express your grief in ways that you think will actually be useful. You arrange eulogies, giving yourself and your friends a chance, to talk about how much you miss the person’s goodness. You have Dhamma talks, you give gifts, you dedicate the merit to the person who’s died.

But when you realize that your grief is becoming self-indulgent, then you remind yourself that you do have work to do in this world. Here the Buddha also has you remember the fact that anybody who is born, has to die. If you think about all the people who have died today, every day, that takes some of the weight off your own grief. All too often, when we’re feeling grief, it’s as if the whole universe is focusing its weight on us. But you realize, no, this sorrow is spread around. That should give rise to a feeling of compassion for all those who are suffering from loss right now. So you turn the grief into compassion, which is a much more skillful emotion.

Those are the four things the Buddha has you accept. And as you see, acceptance doesn’t mean just sitting there and putting up with these things. It also means having the tools so that you don’t have to suffer from them.

• But there are things the Buddha has you not accept, and these cover a much larger range than the things he recommends accepting: You don’t accept the arising of any unskillful thoughts in the mind: thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness—in other words, anything that would come under wrong resolve—and then he adds, “any unskillful quality at all.” You try to get rid of these things as quickly as you can. This may involve watching them for a while so as to understand them. In other words, you do the five-step analysis that we’ve been discussing this week: see where these thoughts come from, see how they pass away, try to understand the allure, and remind yourself of their drawbacks, until you finally develop a sense of dispassion for them so you can let them go and escape from them.

So you can see that the Buddha is very selective as to what he has you accept and what he does not have you accept. It’s very similar to his teachings on contentment. He has you be content with whatever food, clothing, or shelter you have, as long as it’s good enough to practice, but not to be content with any unskillful qualities that arise in the mind. In fact, he says not even to be content with the skillful qualities you have, as long as they haven’t taken you all the way to the end of suffering.

So you can see that the Buddha’s teachings on acceptance and contentment are nuanced. As is the case with so many representations in Buddhism—that Buddhism is all about acceptance or all about letting go—the Buddha actually was selective in these areas. We have a tendency in the modern world to have buzzwords for things. And Buddhism, too, often gets buzz cut to a slogan or two. Which is why it’s good to know his actual teachings, so that you can realize that they’re much more subtle and nuanced than that—and they’re also much more useful because they are more nuanced.